A 99-lap afternoon

The first day of track action for the Made in Italy e dell’Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix saw Scuderia Ferrari HP get through its planned programme over the two hours of free practice, the first in the early afternoon, the second starting at 17.00. Both drivers ran the Pirelli Medium compound and the Soft, the latter C6 making its Grand Prix debut, as the team worked in both qualifying and race configuration, the latter involving a heavier fuel load. 

FP1. For the first few laps, the team opted to run the Soft compound, with Lewis and Charles pitting for adjustments before going out on a new set with which they set their best times. Hamilton got down to 1’16”641, fifth fastest, while Charles was twelfth in 1’17”077. Towards the end of the session they both took on more fuel to run in race trim. The session ended two minutes early after Gabriel Bortoleto went off at the final corner. Hamilton completed 22 laps, one less than his team-mate for a team total of 45.

FP2. This time, Charles and Lewis started on Medium tyres, setting times of 1’16”296 and 1’16”263 respectively. Midway through the session, Charles went out on Soft tyres and posted a 1’15”768 on his second flying lap, followed shortly after by Lewis who stopped the clocks in 1’15”943. In the final third of the session, both cars were fitted with the Mediums used at the start of the hour to run with a heavy fuel load. Charles completed 28 laps, two more than his team-mate, making a team total of 54.

Saturday. Track action resumes tomorrow with the final free practice session at 12.30 CEST, which will be important in terms of preparing in detail for qualifying which gets underway at 16.00, given that grid position is particularly important in Imola, as it is so difficult to overtake here.

Charles Leclerc #16

FP1 was a bit tricky and we faced different challenges during the session. In FP2, we put it together more, but we are still lacking overall performance.
Our race pace looked decent, however, this is a track where overtaking is quite difficult. Our weak point at the moment is our qualifying pace, so this is our priority to work on ahead of tomorrow.

Lewis Hamilton #44

FP1 felt positive — the balance was good and there wasn’t much we needed to change heading into FP2, but the second session was more challenging and it was hard to find consistency. We’ll look into the data we’ve collected this evening, but we completed the programme and the long runs, so there’s solid amount of information to analyse.